xxAACP Newsletter, Volume 17, Number 1, Winter 2003
President’s Column
What’s Leadership Anyway?
What follows is a revision of a letter I sent out recently (possibly to some of you, although by the end of 400 letters, with my husband stuffing envelopes and my kids bribed into sealing them, I’m not quite sure who received the last set, hopefully not everyone on my holiday card list....).
It’s that time of year again, time to elect APA leadership. Ready yourself for the avalanche of uninvited endorsement letters. Do these letters even matter? I think they can, but only if they inspire us to do some thinking, and maybe even gig us into some action! Even if you are not an APA member, read on. Leadership issues are hardly the purview of the APA alone. Y’all can read the candidates’ issue statements in Psychiatric News, or go to the website (www.psych.org). I won’t be giving you a synopsis of those, or a copy of their respective CVs. And I won’t use this space to endorse any candidate in particular.
What I will ask is that you ponder the role of the APA (or whichever organization) and what it should be doing for us (oh-ok, and what we could be doing for the APA and our District Branch), for the front-line-in-the-trenches community and public psychiatrists. You know who you are: those of us who struggle with very sick patients, demanding schedules (how many patients can we see in an hour given a certain collection rate vs how satisfied are we with the care we are giving?), and imperfect systems of care that are often formulated by harried bureaucrats and/or politicians who are ill-informed, and shaped by economics and not by evidence based standards of care. What do we need in our leaders?
We need people who are moral and ethical, who will listen to the entire membership, while utilizing the extant organizational structure (Assembly/components/councils/task forces/APA staff) in an efficient/cost-effective manner, and who will partner with existing mental health organizations to be more productive. We need people who will revel in the rich diversity and varied talents found in our organization. We need people with proven histories of working and advocating for psychiatric patients and their family members. We need people who are grounded in clinical practice, who can advocate for mental health care providers. We need people who have been up to their elbows in current mental health issues like ____________ (you fill in the blank, you know what you are up to your elbows in). We need people who are bright, energetic, articulate, and passionate.
And we need people who can inspire us to become involved, who by their actions and words can elucidate and clarify issues, who can mobilize our affect, and make it feel worth our while to pay dues, and to go to meetings and be productive, and to write letters to the editor or emails to our legislators, and to speak up in forums with our churches or temples, civic leaders, schools, the judiciary, or law enforcement.
Vote early. Vote often (well, ok, don’t vote often). But vote.
President, AACP
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